Politics

Twitter Brings In Academics To Combat ‘Bias’ — Here Are Their Biased Trump Tweets

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Kyle Perisic Contributor
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Twitter announced Monday it would bring in a group of academics to combat bias on the platform, but many of them are openly anti-Trump and anti-conservative.

In this potential conflict of interest, the academics’ previous tweets have resurfaced, calling for “vigilance” against Trump policies, referring to Trump supporters as boot-lickers, accusing Trump of having small hands and saying reasonable Americans would flee the country if Trump won the election, Fox News reported.

These statements contrast sharply with Twitter’s mission of “serving the public conversation and working to increase the collective health, openness, and civility of the dialogue on our service,” as outlined in its Monday post, “Measuring healthy conversation.”

“We want everyone’s experience on Twitter to be free of abuse, harassment and other types of behaviors that can detract or distort from the public conversation,” she added.

Twitter will be forming two teams in this mission. One team, lead by assistant professor of Political Science at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Rebekah Tromble, with the assistance of Patricia Rossini and Jennifer Stromer-Galley at Syracuse University, will examine “echo chambers and uncivil discourse.”

The other aims to study how people use Twitter with the intention of decreasing bias, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported. Some of the team members are vehemently anti-Trump, participated in the women’s march and claim to be a part of the “Resistance.”

Here is a sample of some of the tweets from the academics leading Twitter’s fight in combatting bias on the platform:

Twitter has come under public scrutiny lately over allegations it shadow-bans conservatives, gaining the attention of the president himself. (RELATED: Twitter Shares Drop 19 Percent)

“Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints,” Trump tweeted July 26.

Twitter officials denied the shadow-banning allegations in a blog post after Trump’s tweet, saying they “do not shadow ban” and they “certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

“You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow,” the company added. “[A]lthough you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile.”

A Twitter spokesman told TheDCNF the “two proposals were selected from more than 230 submissions from around the world because of their experience and the rigorous academic standards of their work.”

“The abuse and harassment the lead female researchers are receiving is exactly why this work is important,” the spokesman said. “Everything we do together in the coming months — including their RFP, findings and measurement — will be peer-reviewed and made public so that everyone can assess and learn from what is discovered.”

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